On the 22^nd November, 2012 Centre for Marinelife Conservation and Community Development (MCD) held the conference named “travel, experience and further more…” in order to support and promote the image of community-based ecotourism with the participation of representatives from state- owned enterprises, NGOs, travel agencies and related media.

The conference creates chance for all the local community in MCD’s project sites: Nam Dinh, Thai Binh, Khanh Hoa and Hai Phong Provinces to promote the brand name of their own community-based ecotourism. Besides, the conference introduced the coastal community-based ecotourism model in Cu Lao Cham which aim to promote and develop image and models of marine protected areas and National parks in coastal areas of Vietnam.

During the conference, the communities practiced introducing the beautiful scenery, local traditional products and special features of tourism via the video presented. Additionally, the local communities take the opportunity to perform their own business strategy for travel agent, tour operator in the aim of creating community-based ecotourism network within Vietnam.

After each presentation, the local people received comments and suggestions from travel agencies, tourism experts, NGOs, etc. Then they can get more experience and apply more successfully on their business development. Mostly the visitors have the same feedback that all the presented ecotourism models are quite potential and have ecological and environmental value; however, it is not special enough to attract impressively to the tourists. So in the near future, the communities are supposed to give more efforts on developing products, diversify incomes in order to turn ecotourism into one of the most effectively supplements livelihood for local community in the coastal areas.